Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan's recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a major R&B and pop hit in 1946. In narrating a woman's murder of her abusive husband from a sympathetic first-person point of view, the recording's depiction of domestic violence raises the question of how it achieved mass popularity in a cultural milieu that discouraged frank discussion of this topic. This article accounts for this popularity by tracing the musical and lyrical changes between the hit recording and its sources, the Caribbean folk ballad Payne dead/Murder in the market and calypso performer Wilmouth Houdini's 1939 adaptation He had it coming.
Develops data from interviews about stereotypes of Jamaican and Barbadian men and women. The popular music from Jamaica and Barbados is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the interviews.
Before finding international success and stardom with a string of well-known radio hits, Billy Ocean grinded on the U.K. circuit for well over a decade. The singer-songwriter released a handful of singles and four relatively unknown albums prior to the breakthrough in the mid-1980s, which included a mix of ballads, Caribbean-influenced R&B, club-shaking disco, synth-filled boogie, and even country-inflected Southern soul. The pre-fame arc of Ocean's career is traced record by record.
"This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s." --The Author
Against the backdrop of a tremendous surge in ethnic identity politics and social movement organizing over the last two decades in Ecuador, two complementary musical trends are explored that have emerged in reference to the country's Afro-Ecuadorian population. The first showcases the traditional music and dance of the marimba as a symbol of Afro-Ecuadorian identity. The second features numerous popular music fusions of the marimba repertoire with genres including rock, salsa, reggaetón, and more, with broad appeal to audiences throughout the country and beyond.
In spaces of violence, scholars and activists have typically addressed music as sites of resistance. In postcolonial Caribbean, the focus of most studies unsurprisingly has thus been placed on the work music has done for the oppressed—or conversely, on the ways the (neo)colonial regimes have used music to increase their control over the masses. Until recently, few publications have addressed the music that has been performed to fortify and gather people together in times of hardship. In this case, what is at stake is not so much a matter of 'us and them' or of resistance, but rather the ways in which the 'us' is mobilized to strengthen senses of belonging and networks of solidarity. Amidst the escalating everyday violence since the mid-1990s, party music in Trinidad continues to thrive. Instead of dismissing such music as merely a source of escapism or hedonism, I want to examine what makes it so compelling and what it does for people. This paper is based on in-depth study of soca music making and mumerous ethnographic interviews with Trinidadian soca artists and fans over the past 15 years.
With Joe Arroyo's passing on 26 July 2011, the world has lost a superstar and true innovator of modern Latin music. His work combined lyrics of protest, romance, and spirituality with a joyful music that was at once fresh and accessible. The sixth album Arroyo put out with La Verdad marked a transition from a less adventurous to a more radical approach, where the diverse mix heard on later records is fully embraced for the first time. With Me le fugué a la candela (I escaped the fire) his players gelled, and the pan-Caribbean sound they became famous for came into its own, especially on side two.
As Angola restructures following a long civil war and Brazil takes a leading role among the rapidly developing BRIC nations, new questions arise pertaining to the African heritage in Brazilian music and to Brazil's role in Angolan cultural initiatives and musical markets. Through examination of Brazilian discourse about such exchanges, combined with a comparative analysis of three versions of Angolan musician Teta Lando's 1974 song, Angolano segue em frente—the original, a recent Brazilian re-recording, and a Brazilian remix—new attention is given to the South-South dialogue that builds on historical connections yet also establishes new resonances in musical evocations of Atlantic affinities.
The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
